Kanye West and the people who are too cowardly to fully reconcile with the ignorant anti-blackness he’s been spouting have decided to rally behind the idea that they are “free thinkers,” and that somehow parroting alt-right hate speech is some form of unprecedented independent thought. This, of course, is nonsense. Kanye West is not a black free thinker. He doesn’t even understand the meaning and weight that such a distinction carries.

Kanye West – like Stacey Dash, Ben Carson, Ray Lewis, Clarence Thomas and far too many others – represent the opposite of free thinking. They have traded in the courage of actual free thought and instead have decided to sell their souls. All to appease white supremacists who magnify these black sellouts as vehicles for perpetuating racism and anti-black violence. The same white people who suddenly love Kanye West so much will keep him around as long as he serves the purpose of making them feel right in their supremacy. They will hold him as a righteous example right up until that exact moment when he is no longer useful to their agenda and he is summarily discarded. Then he will be left with no other option but to beg for the love and attention from the same people he turned his back on in his pursuit of the superficial, loveless embrace of whiteness. And in that moment, when the white people he loves so much push him aside for the next tap-dancing spectacle willing to go even farther into the depths of self-hate and self-destruction, he’ll realize just how bad he f***ed up. By then too much damage will have been done for him to return to the black people who loved him when he was too black to be loved by anyone else. And he’ll then be forced to live in a lonely purgatory of irrelevance where he performs his minstrelsy for an audience of one. Himself.

This is the fate of a fool who thinks himself a black free thinker but doesn’t have the capacity to be one.

About the author:

David Dennis, Jr. is a writer and editor based out of Atlanta (but it’s still WHO DAT all day). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Smoking Section, Uproxx, Playboy, CNN Money, The Source, Complex.com and wherever people argue about things on the Internet. He’s a New Orleans Press Club award recipient and has been cited in Best Music Writing. He’s also a proud alum of Davidson College.
Twitter @DavidDTSS